Fifty-eight years on: the previous time Britain swept an F1 podium

Second place at Watkins Glen kept Hill exactly where he had been all weekend: at the top of the standings, with Mexico three weeks away and the title his to lose rather than win.

As it turned out, he wouldn’t lose it.

Hill’s second championship, six years after his first with BRM in 1962, would be confirmed in Mexico by a margin of eight points over Stewart, with Hulme third.

It was the form of a driver at the peak of his powers and his authority within the sport, a status the steering column at Watkins Glen did nothing to dent, because the closing laps never put him under serious threat from anyone behind.

The afternoon required Hill to be solid rather than spectacular, and being solid was, by 1968, something close to his trademark.

Surtees – The fading champion

Surtees inherited his podium place rather than earned it on outright pace.

For most of the race, he ran fourth or fifth, 10 seconds adrift of Dan Gurney in the battle for what both men knew was realistically third, behind the unreachable Matra and Lotus ahead.

The Honda cars were not fast cars by the standards of 1968: one had spent practice waiting for an engine flown in from Tokyo to replace one that had failed at Monza, the other had punctured and then broken a crown wheel and pinion in the wet first session.

Surtees had built his reputation and his 1964 world championship with Ferrari, on machinery that could win outright. The Honda couldn’t, and had not been able to for some time.

What changed his afternoon was Gurney’s tyre, slowly deflating through the final laps without the American immediately realising why he was losing pace.

A patient Surtees closed the gap lap by lap and went past on the penultimate lap of the race to take third, the place he would hold to the flag. It was not a drive that announced itself the way Stewart’s did, or that demanded respect the way Hill’s controlled damage-limitation did.

Instead, it was a result built from outlasting a rival with worse mechanical luck rather than beating his pace, in a season that had given Surtees little else to work with.

By 1968, Surtees remained the only man in the sport’s history to have won world championships on both two wheels and four, a distinction nobody else has matched even now.

But Watkins Glen sat four years on from his title year, in a team no longer capable of giving him a car to match the talent, and a third place arriving via someone else’s puncture was an honest summary of where his career stood.

He wasn’t finished, but his career wasn’t what it had been, either.

What the podiums meant

What the result amounted to, away from any podium ceremony, was three different competitive situations showcasing themselves on the same Sunday afternoon at the same circuit.

It would be 58 years before a similar scenario repeated itself, even though the drivers’ situation is not exactly the same as it was back then and the grid is worlds apart now.

F1 fields in 1968 included far more British names to begin with, simply by the numerical weight of where Formula 1’s constructors and most of its drivers happened to come from.

Barcelona’s repeat of the trick in 2026 came from a different mathematics altogether, three of the grid’s best contemporary drivers happening to share a nationality rather than a nationality happening to dominate the grid the way it did in 1968.

And yet some similarities are easy to see.

Norris arrived in Barcelona as a world champion, his title won the previous season, carrying a similar status to the one Hill carried into Watkins Glen but not, this time, the same command of it.

Norris in 2026 has the title without, at least for now, the form to defend it with authority.

Russell, still without a championship of his own, fills the role Stewart filled in 1968, the driver whose moment has not yet arrived but whose pace increasingly suggests it will.

Hamilton is the harder comparison to make cleanly, because his is not quite Surtees’s story. Surtees was fading in 1968 because the machinery beneath him no longer matched his talent.

Hamilton, having refound his form and with a competitive Ferrari, is still chasing an eighth title that would extend rather than complete his record, so he occupies a stranger kind of late-career territory than Surtees did, more unresolved than simply declining.

The comparison holds at its edges and breaks down a little in the middle, which is probably the right balance for a parallel separated by 58 years.

If you look closely, though, neither podium was really a story about nationality, but about three different points in three different careers, sharing the same piece of track on the same afternoon.